A few years ago, physicists showed that it's possible to erase information without using any energy, in contrast to the assumption at the time that erasing information must require energy. Instead, the scientists showed that the cost of erasure could be paid in terms of an arbitrary physical quantity such as spin angular momentum—suggesting that heat energy is not the only conserved quantity in thermodynamics.
Investigating this idea further, physicists Toshio Croucher, Salil Bedkihal, and Joan A. Vaccaro at the Centre for Quantum Dynamics, Griffith University, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, have now discovered some interesting results about the tiny fluctuations in the spin cost of erasing information. The work could lead to the development of new types of heat engines and information processing devices.
As the scientists explain in a new paper published in Physical Review Letters, the possibility that information can be erased at zero energy cost is surprising at first due to the fact that energy and entropy are so closely related in thermodynamics. In the context of information, information erasure corresponds to entropy erasure (or a decrease in entropy) and therefore requires a minimum amount of energy, which is determined by Landauer's erasure principle.
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